I know this idea of grasping for a sort of immortality in technology all too well, I fear. To avoid a sob story of sorts I’ll skip details, but last year my grandmother died after a surgery. While the initial reaction was likely similar to every death of a grandparent who was far away, what struck me when reading A Resonant Tomb was how much it reminded me of my mother as she grieved for the death of hers.
A few days after my mother came home from handling my grandmother’s affairs, my mother approached me with my grandmother’s cellphone, asking how to pull my grandmother’s voicemail message onto a computer so she could save it. My mother is also an aspiring videographer, and wanted to save my grandmother’s voice so she may use it in later videos.
What I think is special about this is we now no longer run into the problem of the phonograph’s lackluster recording quality, as a digital audio file is a bit-for-bit exact copy of the speaker’s voice. Archival-quality recording material is no longer needed, as the voice file could be put onto a CD, a flash drive, or maybe even the cloud. But then this raises a question similar to the one Be Right Back was asking, is this extended preservation good for you?
This ability to hear someone as if they were sitting next to you, despite their death years ago is a definite double-edged sword. A person can be memorialized, using their voice to remind those who love them of whatever goodness they left in the world. A musician’s best music can be immortalized and can influence generations beyond merely the time they were alive. But also this constant, true-to-life reminder of loss could also cause someone to become stuck in a more comfortable past, one where they don’t have to face the harsh realities that await them when they take off their headphones.